Why User Experience is Key to Improving Procurement Compliance

It’s a frustrating tug-of-war.

Procurement wants a seat at the table as a strategic business partner. Yet, many stakeholders don’t follow their company’s process and still view procurement as a back-office function that issues purchase orders. 

Efficient process adoption is fundamental to helping stakeholders realize the strategic value of procurement. But if your process is hard to follow and understand, internal adoption and procurement compliance become an uphill battle.

That’s why optimizing user experience should always be the starting point to increase process adoption and efficiency.

The relationship between procurement compliance, adoption, and user experience

Procurement compliance involves crafting policies, creating guidelines, and implementing tools that protect your business, mitigate risk, and ensure efficient adoption. The challenge lies in driving internal adoption of these processes to achieve company goals. 

Simplifying the procurement process is crucial to prevent stakeholders from abandoning it and making purchases outside the established process.

Think about Amazon and the B2C buying experience: Amazon’s checkout experience makes it incredibly easy for a shopper to purchase an item from its online storefront. And somehow, that item shows up on your doorstep in days…if not hours. 

But not all B2C buying experiences are created equal. In fact, $260 billion worth of lost online orders are recoverable through better user experience during checkout and 35% of shoppers become turned off from a brand due to one bad user experience. No one enjoys a negative buying experience and it costs companies millions of dollars annually.

Similarly, a fragmented user experience stifles internal adoption of your procurement process and costs you savings. As such, there are five questions you should ask yourself to iterate and improve the user experience of your procurement process to make purchasing easy for end-users.

5 questions to improve user experience and increase process adoption

1. Is my intake process intuitive and simple to use for stakeholders?

The intake is the front door to your entire process.

To increase use of your intake form, ensure it is easy to find. Leveraging a tool with intelligent intake can give stakeholders a seamless experience through one central purchasing portal and URL. 

It’s also important to find the balance between collecting sufficient information and asking as few questions as possible. If you ask too many questions, stakeholders will find your intake process cumbersome. Your goal should be to make it easy and simple. Instead of using long fill-in-the-blank questionnaires that waste your end-user’s time and result in poor data input, try building an intake that allows them to select multiple-choice options and check boxes. 

2. Are stakeholders able to see where their request is during the entire process?

Transparency goes a long way towards efficiency and stakeholder satisfaction.

Ideally, they’ll understand why this entire process needs to happen (i.e. finance and legal checks for budget and risk, etc.). At the very least, they’ll know what has happened so far and the timeline as to what still needs to happen before this request is fulfilled. 

In a time where resources are scarce, it’s surprising how often procurement headcount is used to project manage tactical tasks like communicating status updates to keep stakeholders in the loop. While strong communication is key, a transparent and clear process will decrease the amount of manual communication required. Redeploying those resources to focus on more strategic tasks will generate a larger impact on the business.

3. Do I proactively engage stakeholders with value-added tools, services, and data?

Procurement is often reactive and far too manual to stakeholder requests.

Tools, services, and data can help stakeholders become proactive in the entire process. Tasks like tracking upcoming renewals (plus providing automatic alerts) and monitoring new supplier spend can be automated and viewed in one easy place for stakeholders. Unbiased supplier intelligence can give stakeholders a cost-savings edge and help anchor a fair deal in renewal and new purchase negotiations. 

You can greatly enhance your process with tools, services, and data as it helps build an efficient process that supports stakeholders by reminding them of tasks and arming them with objective data to generate results.

Consider a procurement professional who proactively engages a stakeholder early and sends a note like this (versus waiting for the stakeholder to engage with them first):

“Hey Stakeholder, as a reminder your contract with Fictional SaaS Company (FSC) is expiring in 5 months. It might seem a ways off but FSC announced pricing changes that we are going to want to get ahead of. Based on the tool we use, other customers are seeing uplifts as high as 15%. I know your team has a goal to reduce your tech stack spend by 30%. My recommendation is that we explore some alternatives to identify the strongest fit and generate some competition. I did some preliminary sourcing and think we should potentially look at Fictional Competitor One (FCO) or Made Up Provider (MUP). I’ll grab some time on your calendar next week to discuss these and other options. I’ve attached some information you might find helpful.”

4. Am I helping stakeholders meet their objectives and goals?

While profitability and savings are a common goal today, don’t assume that’s the case for every company. Procurement must understand the goals and mechanics of the departments they support. For example, if the marketing team is tasked with generating twenty percent more leads, procurement can lead a sourcing exercise to align with a supplier that can help accomplish this goal. 

One of the best ways to get buy-in is to focus the value proposition of a strong procurement process on enabling stakeholders to spend more time on more pertinent department initiatives related to their strengths (and less distracted time on procurement-related activities). 

When departments handle procurement themselves, one of two outcomes tend to happen:

• Stakeholders rush through the procurement process, which results in inadequate sourcing, higher risk, missed savings, etc.
• Stakeholders do a great job handling procurement, but it’s an incredible distraction from what they were truly hired to do. 

Procurement is dedicated to managing business spend. The more procurement can take this burden off stakeholders' plates, the more they can focus on what they were hired to do for their department and the better they’ll achieve their goals.

5. Am I supporting stakeholders’ timelines?

The bulk of purchase requests should flow through a sustainable process, which is indicative of a strong and highly adopted process.

While some purchases will take months, maybe longer, other requests will need to be carried out in weeks, maybe days. That’s the nature of sales cycles, company growth, etc.

Because of this, you must understand the timeline of your supplier and stakeholder. Managing expectations of those two parties through transparent communication of your entire process builds more trust and buy-in, ultimately increasing process adoption and procurement compliance. Not to mention, being willing to move things at a quicker pace for an urgent request can result in a thankful and satisfied stakeholder. 

Transform your purchasing function

Strong process adoption requires a strong focus on user experience. Leverage the questions above to help you design a process that is intuitive, transparent, and user-friendly for stakeholders. You’ll not only increase procurement compliance and reduce rogue spend, but you’ll improve procurement’s perception and finally have a seat at the table as a strategic partner.

Take a step in the right direction by leveraging strategic and intelligent procurement. Interested in improving your process through our user-friendly intake and platform? Request a demo today.

Recommended Reading

• 8 Steps to Increase Spend Visibility
• Buyer Guide: 4 Questions to Ask When Evaluating Third-Party Pricing Data
• ‍2023 SaaS Industry Trends and Benchmarks